Against Shooting Drills

Why those who support school shooting drills should support mandatory listening to the Blocked and Reported podcast

How many people do you think are killed in school shootings per year? Before you read the answer, take a moment to consider what the answer might be. Do you think school shootings are a major epidemic?

The answer: about 10 per year. While the media prattles on constantly about how serious school shootings are and claims we should be in constant fear of them, they kill about one person every 36 days. Not only that, the number of people dying in school shootings has been trending down. In the 90s, school shootings were more common and more lethal than they are today. The chart below shows how the numbers have gone down over time:

Orders of magnitude more people die by drowning and bicycle accidents and even lightning—there are about as many deaths from cannibalism, champagne corks, fireworks, rock climbing, skydiving, alligator deaths, and about a hundred other things that no one treats as an epidemic. Yet bizarrely, we terrify tens of millions of kids by subjecting them to active shooter drills, making them simulate a situation with an active shooter. Often, these drills are highly realistic, involving fake blood and gunfire, sometimes with the students unaware they’re drills.

Unsurprisingly, these drills are highly terrifying to those as young as elementary schoolers who do not understand the low probability of being shot, and consequently live in constant fear based on a totally bogus myth of frequent shootings. About 60 percent of students report feeling “unsafe, scared, helpless, or sad as a result of experiencing active shooter drills.”

There’s no convincing evidence that such drills work, yet despite this, the overwhelming majority of schools have them. We are terrifying millions of children based on something that we have no evidence works to help stop a problem that kills fewer people than champagne corks. Such is the extent of psychosis induced by salient yet low-probability events.

If anything, I’d expect these to make mass shootings more likely. By making mass shootings permanently emblazoned into the public consciousness so that people are thinking about them constantly, it makes people more likely to carry them out. Mass shootings trigger copycats because of their salience; the less we focus on them, the more we do to prevent them. School shootings were not a thing prior to the Columbine shooting which was so heavily reported on by the media that it caused many others to follow the Columbine shooters.

Now, one might think that these programs are worth it if they save just a few lives. Even if we grant that they save a few lives, the view that this would make them worthwhile is crazy. We should not massively terrify 50 million children to prevent a few deaths.

Should we force children to undergo scaremongering training on how to deal with choking, talking about how anyone you know might choke whenever they eat, and you should live in constant fear? We could have choking drills, where a person pretends to choke, to prepare children for what to do if a person is choking. Such a thing might save a few people from choking. We could force government experts to open all champagne corks, thus saving a few people from death by cork. We could ban rock climbing and sky diving, make it illegal to be in any alligator-infested area (e.g. Florida), and have a cannibalism-related death investigator be situated at every school, both investigating potential cannibalism deaths and giving terrifying presentations to school children about the supposed child-eating cannibal epidemic.

Even if such a policy would cut in half the number of cannibalism-related deaths, any sane person would recognize that it’s a bad idea. Everything is commensurable; we shouldn’t always save lives if the inconvenience is great enough. There are all sorts of rare diseases that kill a few people a year that we could spend a significant share of global GDP on. No one supports this because we all recognize that, though it sounds bad, there’s some amount of money and inconvenience that isn’t worth saving someone’s life. We should not burn the entire GDP saving 500 people from 50 rare diseases.

When I recently argued that active shooter drills are a bad idea over lunch, arguing that school shootings are not, in the grand scheme of things, a very serious problem, the people around me were outraged. How could I say to a grieving mother who’d lost a child in a school shooting that what happened to her child wasn’t very important? But this is an appeal to obvious bias: certainly, a person affected by school shootings would think they’re a big deal. But the same thing is true of choking and death from corks—it would be callous to tell a grieving mother whose child died from a cork that cork deaths aren’t a big deal, but like, they aren’t.

Not every true statement is appropriate to tell to a grieving mother who just lost her child.

It’s true that school shootings involve murders rather than accidental deaths. But surely this doesn’t make a huge difference to how much we should do to stop them? Cannibalism isn’t a huge issue, even though it’s intentional. Preventing 10 intentional deaths might be a bit better than preventing 10 intentional deaths, but it’s not much better—maybe as good as preventing like 15 accidental deaths? If it turned out that alligators were more pernicious and conscious of their wrong-doing than we thought, alligator attacks would still not be a severe crisis.

In 2001, RFK Junior had affairs with 37 women. Surely having an affair with RFK Junior is a fate worse than death, as Katie Herzog conclusively demonstrated on the best podcast on the internet, Blocked and Reported (well, except for my short-lived podcast with Amos Wollen). Yet even though those actions were regrettably intentional, affairs with RFK Junior are a moderately severe problem, but not a huge epidemic.

If you support school shooting drills, therefore, I’d suggest that you should also support frequent and terrifying “getting hit on by RFK Junior,” drills that prepare people for what to do if RFK hits on them. While such drills might be traumatic for young children (it would no doubt involve playing clips of Katie Herzog impersonating RFK Junior dirty-talking which is roughly as traumatizing as an active shooter drill), even one life lost to this scourge is too many. Let the school halls ring out with clips of Katie Herzog saying, in her raspy impression of RFK Junior, “Olivia, Olivia, show me your tits.”